Anthony Bailey

All Your Face Are Belong To Us

Tuesday from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

Well someone had to make the obvious joke re Facebook applying for a trademark on the term “face”, even if I am late as usual. - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Review: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars - http://anthonybailey.net/blog...

Sunday from Anthony Bailey's blog - Comment - Like

Anthony Bailey

Review: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars

Sunday from Anthony Bailey's blog - Comment - Like

(hreview version 0.2) (Reviewed on 29 August 2010 by Anthony Bailey) product The Mars Trilogy (Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars) by Kim Stanley Robinson I read The Mars Trilogy since it loiters near the top of most of the lists of great sci-fi novels I've encountered. This is mostly a "me too, +1" review. The three books follow the fortunes of the "First Hundred" Mars colonists. There is plenty of hard structural and terraforming science, and much exploration of the social and political fall-out of founding a separated human world, but it shines as a story about fascinating people and their lengthened lives. As I read, my simplifying pattern-matching machinery decided "this is Deadwood in space", and it is a strong enough analogy I think that, with enough love and skill, a TV adaptation could work - despite understandable concerns to the contrary. - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Surely You're Trolling, Mr Allen!

Sunday from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

Reading about Paul Allen’s recent round of “…but on the web” e-commerce patent suits reminds me of one of the most objectionable aspects of the current patent system: the way that when a new technology or medium appears, rights to using it in combination with existing ideas seem to get assigned in a “first post!” manner. It always makes me think of this excerpt from the “I Want My Dollar!” story Feynman tells in “Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman!”: …during the war, at Los Alamos, there was a very nice fella in charge of the patent office for the government, named Captain Smith. Smith sent around a notice to everybody that said something like, “We in the patent office would like to patent every idea you have for the United States government, for which you are working now.[…] I say to him, “That note you sent around: That’s kind of crazy to have us come in and tell you every idea. […] There are so many ideas about nuclear energy that are so perfectly obvious, that I’d be here all day... - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

I am not a third party

August 25 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

You may be aware that because of its unsuitability as a mechanism to give third-party applications suitable access to a user’s account, Twitter are phasing out Basic Auth at the end of this month, supporting only OAuth from then on. This is annoying for those of us who individually automate some aspect of our Twitter use - Dave Winer’s reaction is illustrative. I recently sighed and reluctantly updated the relevant bit of my homegrown blog admin. (I followed the same kind of approach I used recently for the Facebook graph API.) The reason it irks is that although OAuth is surely appropriate in a third-party developer API, it is not so for a client API that allows an individual user to script their regular interactions with a web presence. OAuth is overly heavyweight. It makes assumptions that are not true. And it does not reflect the simple client usecase - a way to automate the things I can do by hand without resorting to robot-clicking and screen-scraping. If some action or resource... - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Headius: My Thoughts on Oracle v Google

August 16 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

Headius: My Thoughts on Oracle v Google: A great piece by Charles Nutter laying out the context and content of Oracle’s patent claims against Android. - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Recommended Listening: CometD and Push Technology Greg Wilkins...

August 11 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

Recommended Listening: CometD and Push Technology Greg Wilkins talks about Comet (that “long-poll” AJAX approach to approximate two-way communication between client browser and web server) in this episode (48min) of Phil Windley’s Technometria. As well as introducing the technique he offers opinions on how to use it both clientside and serverside, and how other technologies such as websockets and SPDY fit in. I felt vaguely ignorant of this stuff before listening to the interview; afterward I feel vaguely informed (albeit by an interested party who maintains the CometD library, and Jetty.) - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

The Monster Book of Logic Puzzles & Sudoku - http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp...

July 24 from Amazon.com wish list - Comment - Like

Anthony Bailey

Re-opening Portal (my favorite custom maps)

July 11 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

A few co-workers recently succumbed to peer pressure and got around to playing Portal. There has been much quoting of GLaDOS and xkcd recently as a result. I loved playing the game and many user-created maps. So for those who have tackled the Advanced Chambers and still want more, I’ve put together a list of my favorites. (I won’t link directly; you will probably find them all on both My Aperture Labs and Thinking With Portals but I’m not confident about either site’s permalinks.) My tastes in brief: I tend to like puzzles and neat uses of physics; I’m really not very skillful and if much dexterity is required then I want reassurance that I’m not wasting my time. I’ve already previously praised the huge, wonderful conversion Portal: The Flash Version. Others that suit my tastes, in vaguelly descending order: *UPDATE* Marf Aperture by MasterMarf (may be the best one yet!) LoveGLaDos by Graxthal (gated right at the start - see my note on crouching, below) Weighted Companion Cube Map by... - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Prince pun

July 7 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

My late joke re the Prince thing: though still mostly downloaded, he’s now the artist formally known through Print - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

PeepCode: Rethinking Rails 3 Controllers and Routes

June 3 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

PeepCode: Rethinking Rails 3 Controllers and Routes: The scales fell from my eyes as I read Geoffrey Grosenbach’s post on how Rails’ restful route to controller action translation has become a pointless, wasteful abstraction. - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Exporting your Facebook graph

May 9 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

I’m not a real Facebook user. I have a “ghost” account on there that puts my tumblelog on the wall, and redirects people to my real home outside the Facebook walls. The ghost also acts as my doorway into searching the Facebook network, and helping my partner with the Miss Fitz-Poste’s Modern Mixers fan page. One of the things that has kept me from spending time there is the lock-in factor. Although I can write my own web apps to publish content, I much prefer to use services provided by others - but only if I have the ability to migrate that content elsewhere. As an experiment, I tried using the new Facebook graph API to export data from their site. Happily, it’s pretty easy to do this. Although the pseudo-privacy controls means you have to jump through some OAuth hoops, you can do it all from your browser. Register a Facebook app. OK, this sounds like a big deal, but you just have to provide any old name, and a site URL (later known as the App URL.) The key thing is that this does... - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

This is not an XKCD strip

April 30 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

Team: *lunchtime discussion about the differences between company "director" and "acting director" roles* Andy: ...and we would call the other one "director prime". Right, this has got too nerdy, end conversation. Anthony: But we were only one pun away from Star Trek... do you think there's a Godwin's Law variant specific to nerd talk? Some topic whose probability of being discussed gradually approaches 1? Andy: This topic. - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Like, no.

April 28 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

Like, no. - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Re: http://anthonybailey.tumblr.com/post... - http://anthonybailey.tumblr.com/post...

April 26 from Disqus - Comment - Like

"All three acts are now finished. http://www.doctoroctoroc.com/8-bit-d... Sincere love for both ingredients in the mix is evident. Pixel perfect." - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Re: http://anthonybailey.tumblr.com/post... - http://anthonybailey.disqus.com/thread_...

April 26 from Disqus - Comment - Like

"All three acts are now finished. http://www.doctoroctoroc.com/8-bit-d... Sincere love for both ingredients in the mix is evident. Pixel perfect." - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Review: For The Win

April 17 from Anthony Bailey's blog - Comment - Like

(hreview version 0.2) (Reviewed on 10 April 2010 by Anthony Bailey) Review is in the public domain product For The Win by Cory Doctorow Doctorow weaves a highly original story setting from three observations. Currency and assets in virtual worlds have significant real world value and large economies within which some people work for a living. The distributed and global nature of the Net is a good fit for mobilizing employees of contemporary corporations. The nature of wealth in a speculative information-driven economy is open to disruption—to gaming, if you will. Within this context he presents a fable for young people on the historic and future importance of worker unionization. No, seriously. Actually. it works really well: the adventure story and the message play very nicely together. I rate this as a better combination of techno-thriller and political writing than another recent read (FreedomTM, Daniel Suarez' sequel to Daemon), along both axes: For The Win is more fun despite... - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Review: For The Win - http://anthonybailey.net/blog...

April 17 from Anthony Bailey's blog - Comment - Like

Anthony Bailey

Eight bit Doctor Horrible adaptation. Wonderflonius!

April 8 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

Eight bit Doctor Horrible adaptation. Wonderflonius! - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

The hopeful tale of an unspoiled Twilight

April 1 from Anthony Bailey's blog - Comment - Like

Viewers of television shows with long narrative arcs know the Net can be a double-edged sword. It can provide many pleasant words shared with other engaged fans. It can also deliver much pain in just a few unwanted words of spoiler. The key to avoiding the latter, I think, is community and convention. For many years as a UK viewer, I found myself jealously observing the growth of lively Net discussion of their unfolding stories. The time delay between US and UK airing of the shows meant I couldn't actively participate in those discussions, only read them many months after the fact. Meanwhile even a casual browsing of fan sites for the shows ran quite a risk of being spoiled. More lately this has been less of a problem for me, since I can download episodes of the few shows I do watch week-by-week shortly after they air in the US. Instead I observe others experiencing an analogous problem at a smaller timescale as they attempt to combine a DVR-based viewing schedule with their eager... - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Thoughts on SRC 2010… Last week-end was the third Scottish...

March 30 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

Thoughts on SRC 2010… Last week-end was the third Scottish Ruby Conference (well, technically the previous two were Scotland On Rails Conferences.) It continues to grow - three hundred attendees and three presentation tracks. Purely selfishly I think I preferred it just a little smaller and tighter, but it has scaled very well and I still enjoyed plenty of good talks and chats, so the total value from the event must be way up. Congratulations to organizers Paul, Alan, Graeme et al. Overly abbreviated highlights: Tim Bray’s keynote on where Ruby isn’t (concurrency, enterprise and mobile) was provocative and very popular. My favorite talk was New Bamboo on how to do speed-run coding; amusingly presented, with a graph-backed economic motivation followed by dozens of juicy details. There was also an enlightening fight over the value or otherwise of mocks, about which I must not forget to blog in more detail. Finally I ditched the Saturday wrap-up party in favor of sleep before a coding... - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Mangled - http://mangled.me/blog...

March 19 from Backtype - Comment - Like

"Also just heard about this: http://www.cs.brown.edu/people..." - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Mangled - http://mangled.me/blog...

March 18 from Backtype - Comment - Like

"This is only a subset of your interesting and radical idea, but re “The compiler and automated tests can update a build/test result page!”; FitNesse is a successful Wiki-based acceptance test environment along those lines: http://fitnesse.org/" - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Enterprise Java

March 10 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

class $$$ { public static $$$ $$$$( $$$ $$$ ) { return $$$; } } - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

March 5 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

http://www.w3.org/TR...: This document makes me happy. - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Re: Buzzing noise - irritating but deliberate? - http://anthonybailey.tumblr.com/post...

February 28 from Disqus - Comment - Like

"Ah, you *can* use Buzz without Gmail: your profile is the place to go. You just have to make a rel="me" chain back from the pages whose updates you want to claim. Makes sense. http://www.google.com/buzz...... We'll see if this comment gets through the chain I've set up (Disqus aggregated by FriendFeed linked to anthonybailey.net linked to Google Profile) and whether they do a decent job with loops and dedupe... for the sake of my two brave Buzz followers I sure hope so." - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Re: Buzzing noise - irritating but deliberate? - http://anthonybailey.disqus.com/buzzing...

February 28 from Disqus - Comment - Like

"Ah, you *can* use Buzz without Gmail: your profile is the place to go. You just have to make a rel="me" chain back from the pages whose updates you want to claim. Makes sense. http://www.google.com/buzz...... We'll see if this comment gets through the chain I've set up (Disqus aggregated by FriendFeed linked to anthonybailey.net linked to Google Profile) and whether they do a decent job with loops and dedupe... for the sake of my two brave Buzz followers I sure hope so." - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Brian Swan gave a strongly anti-mock talk as part of the most...

February 25 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

Brian Swan gave a strongly anti-mock talk as part of the most recent ScotRUG. It was pretty much point-for-point how I feel on the subject (apart from the bit at the start on “no getter” coding, with which I have had little contact.) - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Buzzing noise - irritating but deliberate?

February 15 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

There seems to be a blog consensus that Google screwed up the launch of Buzz and that even the idea there could be privacy concerns caught them by surprise. Well, maybe. Certainly they could have done better, and lessened the worst kind of damage. But I speculate they knew the auto-follow would cause disquiet, and did it anyway. Every previous Google attempt at social networks (Orkut, FriendConnect) had mostly failed to catch on due to network effects. To be useful, you have to be large. Auto-follow gets you the critical mass you require very quickly. (Myself, I’m waiting for Buzz to be enabled for non-Gmail Google accounts. I have a “public by default” attitude and a Google profile linked to a Reader account and associated with a homepage that exposes tons of contacts information - so auto-follow will suit me very well once they offer a Buzz detached from the Gmail interface.) - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Re: iplayer-dl is a real TV gem - http://anthonybailey.tumblr.com/post...

February 13 from Disqus - Comment - Like

"Today I tried to use this and it had stopped working - presumably the BBC moved some stuff around. And I did "gem update iplayer-dl" to get the updates that made it work again. Seamless joy." - Anthony Bailey